NWR's 2017 End of the Year Awards

Top Amiibo

Yarn Poochy being our third most anticipated game of 2017 was partially caused by our knowledge of the lineup for this year being “Zelda, Mario, and...” when we voted last year. The fabric pup came out before the Switch so it's likely been forgotten, which is a shame. I'm not even a dog person, and Poochy melted my heart.

Before Mr. Squishy the Metroid came out, I always made sure to bring Poochy with me to distract people. He's huggable, squeezable, and I totally forgot what it does in Poochy and Yoshi's Woolly World but it doesn't really matter. I'm just surprised Yarn Yoshi riding Yarn Poochy pictures didn't conquer Twitter for a month.

2. Super Mario Cereal Box

When first revealed, the Super Mario Cereal seemed preposterous. That it contained an Amiibo seemed even more ridiculous. Sure enough, the hard-to-find sugary breakfast snack features a cardboard box that houses an Amiibo, unlocking little of note in Super Mario Odyssey. This delicious Amiibo also harkens back to the days of scarcity, as right now you likely have to camp outside a Shop Rite whenever they get shipments in to snag this Mario-emblazoned perishable collectible.

But as we close in on more than three years of Amiibo, it’s nice to see that Nintendo can still surprise as the other toys-to-life competitors fade off into the distance. Is a cereal box Amiibo absolutely ridiculous? Yes - but the fact people want it and the very idea of it is worthy of a grin means it’s doing something far better than LEGO sets, a uniform Disney art style, and user-generated characters.

1. Metroid

Hey look, Samus Returns got the Amiibo treatment. While both are gorgeous, it’s the Metroid that provides the most unbridled joy. Samus, adopting the pose shown on the box art, has an undersized head that distracts from an otherwise great-looking Amiibo. The Metroid, on the other hand, is unambiguously amazing, right up with the best ever released.

This is a Metroid which has broken free of its specimen container confines (how did it even fit in there?) and is now floating happily above it. This Amiibo provides perhaps the first really good look at a Metroid in three dimensions—every aspect of its anatomy visible for study. But nice detailing isn’t what propels this Amiibo to the top of the heap, it’s the squishiness: you can squeeze the Metroid’s translucent membrane down to its organs. This feature alone makes this terrifying space jellyfish unwittingly adorable, and science has demonstrated that squeezing this Metroid when you’re having a bad day instantly improves your mood.